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Friday, February 12th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 7:14p | Harvard Researcher: Backdoor Access to US Data Would do Little to Affect Encryption Globally
By The WHIR Proposals from lawmakers to force US companies to provide government agencies with backdoors to encrypted data would put them at a competitive disadvantage, without reducing the global availability of encryption, according to a report released Thursday by Harvard University researcher Bruce Schneier. While emphasizing that the results are not a complete catalogue, but rather more of a survey, Schneier and his team conducted A Worldwide Survey of Encryption Products and found 865 devices or programs incorporating encryption originating from 56 countries, with about one-third of the products coming from the US. Schneier, who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, along with fellow researchers Kathleen Seidel and Saranya Vijayakumar, replicated a study conducted in 1999 by researchers at George Washington University. The original study attempted to catalogue non-US encryption products, and found over 800 hardware and software products from 35 countries. Read more: Juniper Finds Backdoor in its Data Center Security Software US and Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), with an assist from Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has been drafting legislation to provide backdoors to encryption with warrants. Burr also sponsored the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which passed through the Senate in October. “The potential of an NSA-installed backdoor in US encryption products is rarely mentioned in the marketing material for the foreign-made encryption products,” the researchers say in the report. “This is, of course, likely to change if US policy changes.” Read more: NSA’s Hardware Tampering May Alter Global Product Flow The researchers note that with no difference in advertised strength based on geography, “jurisdictionally agile” companies and products will simply leave a home-country that applies a competitive disadvantage. The Daily Dot notes that US encrypted communications company Silent Circle became a Swiss company in 2014 to avoid government snooping, or its marketing ramifications. While some other countries are considering limitations on encryption, like France, Dutch parliament has taken the opposite approach, and the new research clearly indicates that it would not take very many countries avoiding backdoors to undermine the industry in the US, as well as efforts by law enforcement to potentially monitor all digital communication between people and entities. Encryption advocates from Google to Let’s Encrypt, meanwhile, continue to encourage businesses and consumers alike to use encryption more consistently. The US House of Representatives voted to reign in unwarranted surveillance backdoors in June 2014. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/b |
| 10:09p | Verizon Shutting Down Public Cloud, Gives Users One Month to Move Data Verizon Communications, which several years ago had huge public cloud ambitions, is shutting down its public cloud service, which competes head to head with giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company notified its cloud customers of the coming change Thursday, giving them one month to move their data or lose it forever. It has already removed any mention of public cloud compute services from its website. The move appears to be a confirmation of what many in the industry have been predicting, especially since news started coming out of big telcos looking to offload massive data center portfolios they had amassed in recent years to go after the cloud services market. It has become almost impossible to compete with AWS, Azure, and to a lesser extent with Google Cloud Platform in the market for renting virtual compute power over the internet and charging by the hour. In competing with each other, these giants have made the cost of using cloud VMs so low and built out global infrastructure so big, no-one can really manage to keep up. HP made several attempts to become a public cloud provider but failed, and so did Dell. Notably, IBM is still in the market, gradually expanding its cloud data center capacity around the world. Read more: Who May Buy Verizon’s Data Centers? Publicly, Verizon has been quiet about its plan to discontinue public cloud services, one of its spokespeople telling Fortune the closure affected a “cloud service that accepts credit card payments…” The world learned about it from a tweet by one of its cloud customers, who posted the entire notice, giving customers the deadline of April 12 to move their data elsewhere:
A Verizon spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment from Data Center Knowledge in time for publication. The company is offering its Virtual Private Cloud services as an alternative. These are dedicated, physically isolated cloud environments. They are usually a lot more expensive than public cloud services, where many customer VMs run on shared physical servers. “Please take steps now to plan for migration to VPC or another alternative before the discontinuation date,” the notice read. “Verizon will retain no content or data remaining on these Cloud Spaces after that date and any content or data that you do not transfer prior to discontinuation will be irrecoverably deleted.” Services being shut down are Public Cloud and Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces. Public cloud storage services will remain intact. Kenneth White, the user who posted Verizon’s notice on Twitter, is a security researcher and co-founder of the Open Crypto Audit Project. In another tweet, he referred to Verizon’s “credit card payment” response to Fortune as spin:
One of the people who commented under White’s original tweet was involved in one of HP’s failed early efforts to build a public cloud business, saying those efforts stood little chance against AWS:
The commenter, Tim Pletcher, was a senior engineering manager at HP between 2011 and 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, one of the top industry analysts covering cloud services, wrote in a tweet that although the technology behind Verizon’s public cloud was impressive, going from vision to successful product is a difficult road:
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| 11:49p | Firm Files Data Center Heat Wheel Patent Infringement Lawsuit Air Enterprises Acquisition, the exclusive US distributor of the heat wheel-based data center cooling system by KyotoCooling, has filed a lawsuit against competitor Nortek Air Solutions, accusing it of patent infringement. The patent in question adapts heat wheels, a cooling technology used for many years in other industries, for data center cooling. Held by Netherlands-based KyotoCooling, it describes a data center cooling system that relies on a heat wheel in an indirect economization process. Heat wheels are used to maximize the use of outside air for cooling. A heat wheel is a rotating heat exchanger with separate ducts for warm server-exhaust air and cool outside air. It addresses common problems with direct airside economization, such as air contamination and unwanted humidity, thus expanding the number of locations where economization is possible. While KyotoCooling claims hundreds of data centers around the world are cooled using its system, it’s unclear how many heat wheel-based systems Nortek has deployed. Nortek doesn’t list heat wheels as a product on its website. “Air Enterprises is the exclusive licensee of KyotoCooling’s technology in the United States, and as such, we feel it necessary to vigorously protect our rights when competitors offer infringing heat wheel solutions,” Joe Miketo, CEO of Air Enterprises, said in a statement. Case studies on KyotoCooling’s website include data centers by HP in Canada, by United Airlines in the Chicago suburbs, and by BendBroadband in Bend, Oregon, among others. One of the latest adopters of heat wheels for data centers is the Dallas-based data center provider Compass Datacenters, which uses a single standard design to build data centers for different customers around the US. Its second-generation design, announced last year, uses a heat wheel-based cooling system. |
full disclosure, i worked on HP pub cloud effort in early years. no chance against AWS| << Previous Day |
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